“It seems to me, Tillie, you could shake off Absalom through your father’s objections to his attentions.  The fellow could not blame you for that.”

“But don’t you see I must keep him by me, in order to protect you.”

“My dear little girl, that’s rough on Absalom; and I’m not sure it’s worthy of you.”

“But you don’t understand.  You think Absalom will be hurt in his feelings if I refuse to marry him.  But I’ve told him all along I won’t marry him.  And it isn’t his feelings that are concerned.  He only wants a good housekeeper.”

Fairchilds’s eyes rested on the girl as she sat before him in the fresh bloom of her maidenhood, and he realized what he knew she did not—­that unsentimental, hard-headed, and practical as Absalom might be, if she allowed him the close intimacy of “setting-up” with her, the fellow must suffer in the end in not winning her.  But the teacher thought it wise to make no further comment, as he saw, at any rate, that he could not move her in her resolution to defend him.

And there was another thing that he saw.  The extraneous differences between himself and Tillie, and even the radical differences of breeding and heredity which, he had assumed from the first, made any least romance or sentiment on the part of either of them unthinkable, however much they might enjoy a good comradeship,—­all these differences had strangely sunk out of sight as he had, from day to day, grown in touch with the girl’s real self, and he found himself unable to think of her and himself except in that deeper sense in which her soul met his.  Any other consideration of their relation seemed almost grotesque.  This was his feeling—­but his reason struggled with his feeling and bade him beware.  Suppose that she too should come to feel that with the meeting of their spirits the difference in their conditions melted away like ice in the sunshine.  Would not the result be fraught with tragedy for her?  For himself, he was willing, for the sake of his present pleasure, to risk a future wrestling with his impracticable sentiments; but what must be the cost of such a struggle to a frail, sensitive girl, with no compensations whatever in any single phase of her life?  Clearly, he was treading on dangerous ground.  He must curb himself.

Before another Sunday came around, the ax had fallen—­the brethren came to reason with Tillie, and finding her unable to say she was sincerely repentant and would amend her vain and carnal deportment, she was, in the course of the next week, “set back.”

“I would be willing to put back the curls,” she said to her aunt, who also reasoned with her in private; “but it would avail nothing.  For my heart is still vain and carnal.  ’Man looketh upon the outward appearance, but God looketh on the heart.’”

“Then, Tillie,” said her aunt, her kindly face pale with distress in the resolution she had taken, “you’ll have to go home and stay.  You can’t stay here as long as you’re not holding out in your professions.”